Reading Notes: Heidegger, "The Thing"
Oct. 12th, 2010 12:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
raxI took one of the Heidegger pieces to write detailed notes on because I wanted to push myself. Well, uh, I'm pu[ni]shed.
"All distances in time and space are shrinking." I've heard this idea before --- probably people taking after Heidegger, of course --- we can travel faster, we can reproduce the past at great speeds, there's television, which Heidegger says "will soon pervade and dominate the whole machinery of communication." (Did it?)
But this doesn't mean everything is necessarily near to us. "Short distance is not in itself nearness. Nor is great distance remoteness." So what is nearness then, he asks, and then "Is not this merging of everything into the distanceless more unearthly than everything bursting apart?"
And now a brief interlude about the atomic bomb! "The atom bomb and its explosion are the mere final emission of what has long since taken place, has already happened." (I'm sort of skeptical about this at a physics level, but I can see how it's true metaphorically, that is, we've already made the bomb and so the use of the bomb is potentially inevitable? Actually, again --- I can't help but think about a literal atom bomb made of literal atoms --- I think that if you left an atom bomb for 100K years it would eventually become inert. Disarmament through extinction.)
We are unsettled and terrified because things can be not-distant and still not have nearness. So "What about nearness? How can we come to know its nature?" Well fancy that, that was the question I had too! "Nearness, it seems, cannot be encountered directly." Oh. "We succeed in reaching it rather by attending to what is near. Near to us are what we usually call things. But what is a thing?" [0] The jug is a thing! It is self-supporting, independent, and because of that it is not just an object. An object can become a thing, but the "thingly nature of the thing does not consist in its being a represented object." Yes, that's right. The thingly nature of the thing. Whaaaaa? Oh, "The jug remains a vessel whether we represent it in our minds or not." I interpret this (as I was so excited to do with Barad!) as saying that consensus reality is really there, matter is objectively matter, it's a jug and you can't unthink it out of being. I don't know if that's what Heidegger actually means though.
Also the jug was made! Out of earth! And that makes it actually a thing and not just an object --- "Or do we even now still take the jug as an object? Indeed." We don't know how to get from "the objectness of the object" to the "thingness of the thing." (Is there a difference between a thingness and a "thingly nature?") OK. So... "What is the thing in itself? We shall not reach the thing in itself until our thinking has first reached the thing as a thing."
"The jug is not a vessel because it was made; rather, the jug had to be made because it is this holding vessel." The physical "what stands forth" of the jug is just the object and not the thing. Plato (and "Aristotle and all subsequent thinkers") [1] didn't get the thing because he was too focused on this "eidos" or idea of the object. "The jug's thingness resides in its being qua vessel." The part of the jug that holds wine is actually the void between the sides and above the bottom; the potter "only shapes the clay. No--- he shapes the void." How apotheosiscore.
"And yet, is the jug really empty?" (This is actually the question I was just gonna ask.) No, it's full of air, we got tricked. (By... ourselves? By Heidegger? I feel like all of these questions and contradictions are either going to lead to something fascinating, or Heidegger thinks I am a four-year-old.) Wine actually displaces air, it replaces one filling with another filling. "But --- is this reality the jug? No." "Science makes the jug-thing into a non-entity in not permitting things to be the standard for what is real." I'm gonna have to take issue here. No. The jug is an entity. Like the air, and the wine, it is made of matter. You are trying to define air as void just because you, a human, pass through it with relative ease compared to other substrates. Your frame of reference is part of the apparatus making that agential cut, sir. Air is not void. Void is void. If we put you in a vacuum, you'd know the difference. I promise.
Science has annihilated things as things and the atom bomb is the "grossest" example of this. Science's sphere is "the sphere of objects." It is a "weirdness" that "science is [delusionally] superior to all other experience in reaching the real in its reality." I mean, there's something to be said for arguing for the limitations of science, OK, I just don't like his examples so far. So "what, then, is the thing as thing, that its essential nature has never yet been able to appear?"
We didn't lose sight of the jug because of science, Heidegger, we lost sight of the jug because you stopped talking about the jug. "We did not let the jug's void be its own void... We failed to give thought to what the jug holds and how it holds." I'm bothered by this, rhetorically, because we just did. We thought about what the jug holds (air, "void," wine) and how it holds it (by the self-supporting structure of the bottom and sides of the jug, over and between which the liquid is poured in order to place it into the jug). We just thought about that, because Heidegger told us to. Now we are being told that we did not think about it. What did we think about, then?
The jug "holds in a twofold manner" by taking and keeping what is poured in. This "rests on the outpouring" --- the potential for later pouring liquid out of the jug. "The jug's jug-character consists of the poured gift and the pouring out." Even an empty jug has this --- you can't not pour liquid out of a scythe like you can not pour liquid out of an empty jug.
"The giving of the outpouring can be a drink." OK. ... "It stays in the wine by the fruit of the vine, the fruit in which the earth's nourishment and the sky's sun are betrothed to one another." ... ... ... ... ... "The gift of the outpouring is what makes the jug a jug." OK, I liked this idea when we ran into it in one of the other readings, actually --- Sofia talks about this and makes it useful I think. "In the jugness of the jug, sky and earth dwell." ... Sometimes the jug's gift is not for drinking! Sometimes it is a consecration, it is for gods, it does not quench thirst. "In giving the consecrated libation, the pouring jug occurs as the giving gift." "Gush" is "to offer in sacrifice."
"In the gift of the outpouring earth and sky, divinities and mortals dwell together all at once. These four, because of what they themselves are, belong together. Preceding everything that is present, they are enveloped into a single fourfold." Heidegger is wiser than all gods and scientists, for he has created four simultaneous worlds in four simultaneous days.
"The jug presences as a thing. The jug is the jug as a thing. But how does the thing presence? The thing things. Thinging gathers. Appropriating the fourfold, it gathers the fourfold's stay, its while, into something that stays for a while: into this thing, that thing." Does this make any more sense in German??
The Old German word "thing" means a gathering --- "specifically a gathering to deliberate on a matter under discussion, a contested matter." Like res, related to Greek eiro. "Dictionaries have little to report on what words, spoken thoughtfully, say... Etymology has the standing mandate first to give thought to the essential content involved in what dictionary words, as words, denote by implication." Page 175 claims that English "thing" still has "the full semantic power of the Roman word." Is this moving toward a distinction between the bearing-upon and the standing forth? A distinction between an object disconnected from others and a thing with bearing and meaning in a system? If that's where he's headed I could get behind that conclusion despite being intensely frustrated with his prose.
Kant's thing-in-itself is really just an object-in-itself. The only "semantic factor" we can really take from the other uses of the word "thing" is the sense of a gathering if we really want to get into the Heideggerian thingness of a thing. This apparently brings us back to nearness --- the jug, in being a thing which itself things, "stays earth and sky, divinities and mortals," gathering them, "nearing" them by "bringing-near." "Nearing is the presencing of nearness. Nearness brings near --- draws nigh to one another --- the far, and, indeed, as the far. Nearness preserves farness. Preserving farness, nearness presences nearness in nearing that farness. Bringing near in this way, nearness conceals its own self and remains, in its own way, nearest of all." [2] So... by bringing us [back, these days] in touch with the distance between us and things, we see how near they are, because we are [once again] close to their ineffable distance? I'm trying to unpack this. This closeness to distance is nearest of all?
"When we say earth, we are already thinking of the other three along with it by way of the simple oneness of the four." See, I already turned down Catholicism, but thanks anyway.
"Only man dies. The animal perishes. It has death neither ahead of itself nor behind it." Disagree! "She has no archives, no heirlooms, no future / except death," don't you go trying to take away my vixen body without organs Mr. Heidegger.
"Rational living beings must first become mortals." What would D&G say about this? They're who come to mind right now when I think about becomings. I would suspect that if anything, we couldn't become-mortal as they say we couldn't become-man [3], but we could become-immortal at a molecular level. I guess at face value I can accept this statement, especially if you accept the old saw that "man is the only animal who understands his own mortality." I'm not sure I do --- we have some evidence to the contrary --- but certainly our relationship to death is one of our driving forces in art and religion and philosophy and so on. Maybe the argument is that if you exist only in the "immaculate present" you are not mortal? Not sure I agree, but at least there's an argument there.
...which is sort of my way of saying I think the end of this turns into incoherent mush even more than the rest of it. I guess at the very end the question is what can be a thing, and the answer is that anything can be a thing, but "only what conjoins itself out of world becomes a thing." Most things are just objects.
...I still have to turn this into notes that will be helpful to the class and that the professor can read. That will be exciting. I may just give in and say "Hey I spent five or six hours on this, I do not get it, here is what I have." I'm a little skeptical that there is an it to get, but I should probably look for secondary texts or something. I may edit this post or comment to it if I find some.
ETA: Mostly the secondary texts I am finding are other people's blog posts which, rather than throwing their hands up in the air as I do, only talk about the first five pages of the text. I did find this, and it's priceless:
"Seemingly departing from his view that Heidegger ran out of steam in 1930, Harman thinks that Heidegger's analysis of the thinghood of the thing is perhaps his greatest achievement. Having described Heidegger's analysis in the Bremen lectures of the thinghood of a jug he writes: "Whereas Plato, Aristotle, and all later thinkers failed to notice the thinghood of things Heidegger tells us that this neglected thinghood has a fourfold structure. It is a fourfold of earth and sky, gods and mortals" (p. 131). There have so far, he thinks, been only a "handful of weak attempts" to understand the fourfold (das Geviert). Harman's own attempt to explain it is in terms of what he calls the "intersection of two distinct dualisms". Once we have identified these two dualisms the elements of the fourfold will "immediately become clear". The first dualism is that "between a thing's shadowy concealment and its explicit appearance" which "is also known as the temporal interplay between past and future, or between the equipment that silently functions and the signs and broken equipment that show themselves 'as' they are" (p. 133). The second dualism is that "between the unity of a thing's existence and the plurality of its essence or qualities" (p. 133). Harman then proceeds to explain the terms of the fourfold by assigning them to different sides of the two dualisms. For example, mortals, due to their capacity for death as death, are placed "on the side of clearing or revealing, due to the role of the explicit as-structure here" (p. 133) and are assigned to the unity side of the second dualism because they are engaged with death and "death or Angst reveals the world as a whole and not a plurality of specific things" (p. 133). Although some of Harman's explanations are genuinely helpful, this is not one of them.--Paul Gorner, University of Aberdeen."
If there have only been a handful of attempts to explain this and the attempts that have been made are basically crack as above, I feel less bad about going huhguhbuhwha.
[0] I know this is ridiculous, but I cannot help but read this essay and think of the hyper-machismo old spice commercials. "I am the philosopher your philosophy could read like. Look at me. Look at you. Look at me. I'm an atomic bomb. Look at my hand, now at yours. Now at mine. I am holding a jug. The jug is a thing. It has the thingly nature of that thing you like. I'm on a horse."
[1] The last person I know who made cracks at "all subsequent thinkers" is the Time Cube guy. Just sayin'.
[2] And the tweedle battle beetles had a tweedle beetle puddle paddle battle.
[3] I'm skeptical of this, but I haven't come up with a really good way to address it yet.
"All distances in time and space are shrinking." I've heard this idea before --- probably people taking after Heidegger, of course --- we can travel faster, we can reproduce the past at great speeds, there's television, which Heidegger says "will soon pervade and dominate the whole machinery of communication." (Did it?)
But this doesn't mean everything is necessarily near to us. "Short distance is not in itself nearness. Nor is great distance remoteness." So what is nearness then, he asks, and then "Is not this merging of everything into the distanceless more unearthly than everything bursting apart?"
And now a brief interlude about the atomic bomb! "The atom bomb and its explosion are the mere final emission of what has long since taken place, has already happened." (I'm sort of skeptical about this at a physics level, but I can see how it's true metaphorically, that is, we've already made the bomb and so the use of the bomb is potentially inevitable? Actually, again --- I can't help but think about a literal atom bomb made of literal atoms --- I think that if you left an atom bomb for 100K years it would eventually become inert. Disarmament through extinction.)
We are unsettled and terrified because things can be not-distant and still not have nearness. So "What about nearness? How can we come to know its nature?" Well fancy that, that was the question I had too! "Nearness, it seems, cannot be encountered directly." Oh. "We succeed in reaching it rather by attending to what is near. Near to us are what we usually call things. But what is a thing?" [0] The jug is a thing! It is self-supporting, independent, and because of that it is not just an object. An object can become a thing, but the "thingly nature of the thing does not consist in its being a represented object." Yes, that's right. The thingly nature of the thing. Whaaaaa? Oh, "The jug remains a vessel whether we represent it in our minds or not." I interpret this (as I was so excited to do with Barad!) as saying that consensus reality is really there, matter is objectively matter, it's a jug and you can't unthink it out of being. I don't know if that's what Heidegger actually means though.
Also the jug was made! Out of earth! And that makes it actually a thing and not just an object --- "Or do we even now still take the jug as an object? Indeed." We don't know how to get from "the objectness of the object" to the "thingness of the thing." (Is there a difference between a thingness and a "thingly nature?") OK. So... "What is the thing in itself? We shall not reach the thing in itself until our thinking has first reached the thing as a thing."
"The jug is not a vessel because it was made; rather, the jug had to be made because it is this holding vessel." The physical "what stands forth" of the jug is just the object and not the thing. Plato (and "Aristotle and all subsequent thinkers") [1] didn't get the thing because he was too focused on this "eidos" or idea of the object. "The jug's thingness resides in its being qua vessel." The part of the jug that holds wine is actually the void between the sides and above the bottom; the potter "only shapes the clay. No--- he shapes the void." How apotheosiscore.
"And yet, is the jug really empty?" (This is actually the question I was just gonna ask.) No, it's full of air, we got tricked. (By... ourselves? By Heidegger? I feel like all of these questions and contradictions are either going to lead to something fascinating, or Heidegger thinks I am a four-year-old.) Wine actually displaces air, it replaces one filling with another filling. "But --- is this reality the jug? No." "Science makes the jug-thing into a non-entity in not permitting things to be the standard for what is real." I'm gonna have to take issue here. No. The jug is an entity. Like the air, and the wine, it is made of matter. You are trying to define air as void just because you, a human, pass through it with relative ease compared to other substrates. Your frame of reference is part of the apparatus making that agential cut, sir. Air is not void. Void is void. If we put you in a vacuum, you'd know the difference. I promise.
Science has annihilated things as things and the atom bomb is the "grossest" example of this. Science's sphere is "the sphere of objects." It is a "weirdness" that "science is [delusionally] superior to all other experience in reaching the real in its reality." I mean, there's something to be said for arguing for the limitations of science, OK, I just don't like his examples so far. So "what, then, is the thing as thing, that its essential nature has never yet been able to appear?"
We didn't lose sight of the jug because of science, Heidegger, we lost sight of the jug because you stopped talking about the jug. "We did not let the jug's void be its own void... We failed to give thought to what the jug holds and how it holds." I'm bothered by this, rhetorically, because we just did. We thought about what the jug holds (air, "void," wine) and how it holds it (by the self-supporting structure of the bottom and sides of the jug, over and between which the liquid is poured in order to place it into the jug). We just thought about that, because Heidegger told us to. Now we are being told that we did not think about it. What did we think about, then?
The jug "holds in a twofold manner" by taking and keeping what is poured in. This "rests on the outpouring" --- the potential for later pouring liquid out of the jug. "The jug's jug-character consists of the poured gift and the pouring out." Even an empty jug has this --- you can't not pour liquid out of a scythe like you can not pour liquid out of an empty jug.
"The giving of the outpouring can be a drink." OK. ... "It stays in the wine by the fruit of the vine, the fruit in which the earth's nourishment and the sky's sun are betrothed to one another." ... ... ... ... ... "The gift of the outpouring is what makes the jug a jug." OK, I liked this idea when we ran into it in one of the other readings, actually --- Sofia talks about this and makes it useful I think. "In the jugness of the jug, sky and earth dwell." ... Sometimes the jug's gift is not for drinking! Sometimes it is a consecration, it is for gods, it does not quench thirst. "In giving the consecrated libation, the pouring jug occurs as the giving gift." "Gush" is "to offer in sacrifice."
"In the gift of the outpouring earth and sky, divinities and mortals dwell together all at once. These four, because of what they themselves are, belong together. Preceding everything that is present, they are enveloped into a single fourfold." Heidegger is wiser than all gods and scientists, for he has created four simultaneous worlds in four simultaneous days.
"The jug presences as a thing. The jug is the jug as a thing. But how does the thing presence? The thing things. Thinging gathers. Appropriating the fourfold, it gathers the fourfold's stay, its while, into something that stays for a while: into this thing, that thing." Does this make any more sense in German??
The Old German word "thing" means a gathering --- "specifically a gathering to deliberate on a matter under discussion, a contested matter." Like res, related to Greek eiro. "Dictionaries have little to report on what words, spoken thoughtfully, say... Etymology has the standing mandate first to give thought to the essential content involved in what dictionary words, as words, denote by implication." Page 175 claims that English "thing" still has "the full semantic power of the Roman word." Is this moving toward a distinction between the bearing-upon and the standing forth? A distinction between an object disconnected from others and a thing with bearing and meaning in a system? If that's where he's headed I could get behind that conclusion despite being intensely frustrated with his prose.
Kant's thing-in-itself is really just an object-in-itself. The only "semantic factor" we can really take from the other uses of the word "thing" is the sense of a gathering if we really want to get into the Heideggerian thingness of a thing. This apparently brings us back to nearness --- the jug, in being a thing which itself things, "stays earth and sky, divinities and mortals," gathering them, "nearing" them by "bringing-near." "Nearing is the presencing of nearness. Nearness brings near --- draws nigh to one another --- the far, and, indeed, as the far. Nearness preserves farness. Preserving farness, nearness presences nearness in nearing that farness. Bringing near in this way, nearness conceals its own self and remains, in its own way, nearest of all." [2] So... by bringing us [back, these days] in touch with the distance between us and things, we see how near they are, because we are [once again] close to their ineffable distance? I'm trying to unpack this. This closeness to distance is nearest of all?
"When we say earth, we are already thinking of the other three along with it by way of the simple oneness of the four." See, I already turned down Catholicism, but thanks anyway.
"Only man dies. The animal perishes. It has death neither ahead of itself nor behind it." Disagree! "She has no archives, no heirlooms, no future / except death," don't you go trying to take away my vixen body without organs Mr. Heidegger.
"Rational living beings must first become mortals." What would D&G say about this? They're who come to mind right now when I think about becomings. I would suspect that if anything, we couldn't become-mortal as they say we couldn't become-man [3], but we could become-immortal at a molecular level. I guess at face value I can accept this statement, especially if you accept the old saw that "man is the only animal who understands his own mortality." I'm not sure I do --- we have some evidence to the contrary --- but certainly our relationship to death is one of our driving forces in art and religion and philosophy and so on. Maybe the argument is that if you exist only in the "immaculate present" you are not mortal? Not sure I agree, but at least there's an argument there.
...which is sort of my way of saying I think the end of this turns into incoherent mush even more than the rest of it. I guess at the very end the question is what can be a thing, and the answer is that anything can be a thing, but "only what conjoins itself out of world becomes a thing." Most things are just objects.
...I still have to turn this into notes that will be helpful to the class and that the professor can read. That will be exciting. I may just give in and say "Hey I spent five or six hours on this, I do not get it, here is what I have." I'm a little skeptical that there is an it to get, but I should probably look for secondary texts or something. I may edit this post or comment to it if I find some.
ETA: Mostly the secondary texts I am finding are other people's blog posts which, rather than throwing their hands up in the air as I do, only talk about the first five pages of the text. I did find this, and it's priceless:
"Seemingly departing from his view that Heidegger ran out of steam in 1930, Harman thinks that Heidegger's analysis of the thinghood of the thing is perhaps his greatest achievement. Having described Heidegger's analysis in the Bremen lectures of the thinghood of a jug he writes: "Whereas Plato, Aristotle, and all later thinkers failed to notice the thinghood of things Heidegger tells us that this neglected thinghood has a fourfold structure. It is a fourfold of earth and sky, gods and mortals" (p. 131). There have so far, he thinks, been only a "handful of weak attempts" to understand the fourfold (das Geviert). Harman's own attempt to explain it is in terms of what he calls the "intersection of two distinct dualisms". Once we have identified these two dualisms the elements of the fourfold will "immediately become clear". The first dualism is that "between a thing's shadowy concealment and its explicit appearance" which "is also known as the temporal interplay between past and future, or between the equipment that silently functions and the signs and broken equipment that show themselves 'as' they are" (p. 133). The second dualism is that "between the unity of a thing's existence and the plurality of its essence or qualities" (p. 133). Harman then proceeds to explain the terms of the fourfold by assigning them to different sides of the two dualisms. For example, mortals, due to their capacity for death as death, are placed "on the side of clearing or revealing, due to the role of the explicit as-structure here" (p. 133) and are assigned to the unity side of the second dualism because they are engaged with death and "death or Angst reveals the world as a whole and not a plurality of specific things" (p. 133). Although some of Harman's explanations are genuinely helpful, this is not one of them.--Paul Gorner, University of Aberdeen."
If there have only been a handful of attempts to explain this and the attempts that have been made are basically crack as above, I feel less bad about going huhguhbuhwha.
[0] I know this is ridiculous, but I cannot help but read this essay and think of the hyper-machismo old spice commercials. "I am the philosopher your philosophy could read like. Look at me. Look at you. Look at me. I'm an atomic bomb. Look at my hand, now at yours. Now at mine. I am holding a jug. The jug is a thing. It has the thingly nature of that thing you like. I'm on a horse."
[1] The last person I know who made cracks at "all subsequent thinkers" is the Time Cube guy. Just sayin'.
[2] And the tweedle battle beetles had a tweedle beetle puddle paddle battle.
[3] I'm skeptical of this, but I haven't come up with a really good way to address it yet.